Abroad in Baltimore #19
Getting in the Groove
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I have a little mantra I tell myself whenever I’m nervous I’ll never adapt to a new situation. In (x) number of weeks, this will all be normal. For my first year in Paris it was six weeks, for my first semester at MICA it was four. This semester, that number was three as this is not a brand new school year or brand new school, three weeks was all I needed to fully get back in the groove.
My juggling isn’t yet perfect, show me someone who is, but this week is where I hit my stride. That’s not to say it isn’t challenging, far from it, but rather that I’ve adjusted to the pace of the week and can expect ease and quality of life to increase from here. It’s been and still will be a stretch, but it’s one I can only welcome as I know that by the end of the semester I will feel that much stronger in my skills.
One of my favorite classes of the week is Digital Editorial, taught by the same professor as Global Typography. For much of my course selections I was following the course description, but for Digital Editorial I was fortunate enough to already know the professor and really look forward to his class.
Right now we’ve been assigned a Shakespeare tragedy and are adapting it into a news website. I’ve taken a gossip blog approach and am having a blast coming up with sensational click-bait headlines. It’s also a comprehensive exercise in all things design, from hierarchy and layout to grids and type. For me, this class hits all the sweet spots of design and I look forward to class every week.
Something I will never stop appreciating is how much creative freedom we’re given as 3rd year art students. I remember feeling a more of a guiding hand in my Foundation and 2nd years, but I think it’s safe to say that the training wheels are off and projects are becoming increasingly reliant on what the individual students make of it.
I personally love this as in typical artist fashion, whenever someone lays down a set of rules, they tend to chafe against my own ideas. What we do as artists is often minimized and misunderstood, either by society at large or even our grandmother, it’s hard to get people who aren’t artists to understand what it is we do.
It’s because we’re good at what we do that we make it look easy. Art is so often looked at through the cynical mindset of, “Oh, well I could do that.” My favorite rebuttal I’ve seen to this is, “Yeah, but you didn’t.” Being an artist is different from a lot of other professions, but to quote fictional food critic Anton Ego, “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”